shushit retweetledi
A basic principle that we care about in law is the reliability of pieces of evidence and determining whether some pieces of evidence are more reliable than others.
One of the ways is evaluating if the evidence objective, like black and white artifacts.
Another way is seeing if it was created long before the dispute arose. If you make something up after the dispute arose, then we say, "Well, you had an incentive to make that piece of evidence up." But if it was created thousands of years ago, and it was found by a German or a Egyptian or English archeologist hundreds of years ago, long before this whole debate about Zionism ever arose, then it gets extra credibility.
What we've seen, and just to move along the point, is that, the argument has shifted in recent years—and this just happened with Tucker Carlson's interview of Mike Huckabee several weeks ago—to something softer where some say: "Okay, fine there was a Hebrew Temple there. Yes, it was destroyed by Titus of Rome in 70 AD. All the Jews were wiped out there or thereabouts, and they, the ones that remained, intermarried and assimilated, and Judaism came to an end. So the Jews that exist today are not actually in any meaningful way connected to the Jews of ancient Israel."
This is the new claim.
They claim that in 805 AD there was a king of a Khazar Kingdom—these are Turkic people from the Central Asian steppe, descendants of the Scythians and the Parthians and the Mongols—who took over part of what's now Ukraine. And, by the way, this part of the story is true.
Anyway, this Khazar king in 805 AD, he starts reading about the Hebrew Bible. He becomes obsessed with the Jews and he converts to Judaism. This is true. And he force converts his Khazar, his people, his subjects, to convert to Judaism also.
There's no significant evidence that after his death that was continued, but what some people are saying now is, "Okay, well maybe all the Jews who are around today are really the descendants of these Khazar Jews, converts, and therefore have no legitimate right to be in the land of Israel."
But, as I write in Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law, this argument has been disproven also in various different ways.
One of the ways is that there have been extensive genetic studies of all the major Jewish populations in the world, including North African Jewish populations, Middle Eastern Jewish populations—including in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Genetic studies have also been done of European populations, which are different—the Italian Jews, the Spanish Jews, the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. And then importantly for purposes of this story, the Iranian and Iraqi Jews who are descendants long ago of the Babylonian exile.
And these genetic tests, over dozens of genetic markers, conducted by various different scientists—some of them Jewish, some of them not—over many decades have all dispositively shown that first of all, there's absolutely no connection between modern-day Jews and the Khazars.
Those tests have been done and that theory has been debunked.
The other thing those genetic tests have shown is that the major Jewish populations of the world are all intimately interconnected, all one with the other.
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